New Apple Mac Studio goes straight to M5 Max and M5 Ultra with significant performance gains

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Quick Summary

Apple has announced a new Mac Studio sporting either the M5 Max or M5 Ultra chips.

Designed for heavy computing, the models start at £2,499 / $2,499.

Apple has opted to skip a generation with its new Mac Studio and go straight to M5 chips. While we had an M4 Max version last year, there was no M4 Ultra – so now we have a considerable upgrade.

The new Mac Studio is available with the M5 Max chip inside, or the M5 Ultra, with the latter capable of more than 10x the AI processing performance of an M1 Max model. It's almost 8x faster than the 2025 flagship version, too.

The mini Mac also features up to 512GB of unified memory, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity.

It is a true powerhouse that has been designed for professional use – including content creation, development, engineering and AI training. Gaming is even a consideration, with Apple claiming that it can run Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing one and a half times more effectively than its predecessor.

The M5 Max chipset features an 18-core CPU, up to 40-core GPU, up to 128GB of unified memory, up to 613GB/s memory bandwidth and a 16-core Neural Engine.

The M5 Ultra, on the other hand, really takes things up a notch. You get up to 36-cores on the CPU, 80-cores on the GPU, 512GB of unified memory, 1.2TB/s bandwidth, and a 32-core Neural Engine.

Naturally, the prices reflect the specs. The Mac Studio M5 Max starts at £2,499 / $2,499, while the Mac Studio M5 Ultra model begins at £5,499 / $5,499.

If you're feeling particularly flush and want the very best, you can expect to pay up to £18,299 / $18,299.

Pre-orders are open on Apple.com now with deliveries starting on 22 September 2026.

Apple has also announced a new Mac mini if you don't need quite so much power. It starts at £899 and runs on the new M6 chip. An M5 Pro variant is also available.